Hide Notes 

Slide 1: Why developers should follow WC3 guidelines for better SEO? You may be wondering what exactly are WC3 guidelines and what do they have to do with SEO? Well, WC3 stands for the World Wide Web Consortium which has been established to provide guidelines about how webpages need to be created and structured. The group publishes a number of best practice design principles which are to be employed by webmasters when creating any new pages for their site. Bringing your code into compliance with WC3 guidelines can help your search engine optimisation efforts. There are a couple of major reasons for improving your SEO which includes the spider’s ability to read your code and the position of your content. The primary goal of WC3 guidelines is to promote web content accessibility. Following them can make web content more available to all users, whatever user agent they are using (desktop or voice browser, mobile phone, etc.) or constraints they may be operating under (noisy surroundings, underilluminated rooms, etc.). It can also help people find information on the web more quickly. Most of the key points outlined in web accessibility guidelines can have a positive effect on a website's search engine optimization results. Spiders used by major search engines to find and index websites look for text content because they cannot really "see" or "read" images, flash or animated navigation schemes. Adding descriptions to your pictures and multimedia content can help search engines classify your website's content more accurately while clear navigation and sitemaps ensure that the whole site is viewed by the search engine. When it comes to page content, simple things like proper formatting, use of punctuation and a logical flow between paragraphs go a long way towards making the site more accessible. Using headers on paragraphs, commas and periods where appropriate are clearly SEO best practices as well. Be it proper use of header tags, bolding, bullet point implementation or any other elements, it’s clear that a site is better off from a search engine optimisation perspective when it actually meets WC3 standards. The validity of the HTML code that actually makes up your website is an important aspect of Search Engine Optimisation practices. Regardless of any search engine optimisation efforts made to improve search engine rankings, if the search spiders cannot efficiently read and index your web pages, the site may never receive a good ranking. WC3 code validation services both correct website errors and certify it to be WC3 complaint. The valid code is a crucial aspect of any website promotion. As every written language has its own grammar, vocabulary and syntax, so do website programming languages such as html, php, asp and java. Search engines crawl the code on your website to find relevant content. If it contains errors, search engines might not be able to find some or all of the content on the page, which can spoil your SEO efforts to generate better rankings for your website. Although most major search engines can deal with minor errors in HTML code, a
Slide 2: single missing bracket can be the reason your web page cannot be indexed by the search engines. If you don’t close some tags properly, or if some important tags are missing, search engines might ignore the complete content of that page. Over time, as changes and updates are made to a web page, the code can become littered with unnecessary clutter, slowing down page load times and hurting the efficiency of your web page. Poorly formed and cluttered html can also seriously impact your search engine optimisation efforts. You can make your website more appealing to all by using SEO and web accessibility. To be completely clear, they are two very different things but their values do overlap. Accessibility features help the user whereas search engine optimisation enhances user experience, but there are a few things that both can do for your site. If you make sure that your site complies with WC3 standards, i.e. is highly accessible, it may not only attract more users, but also positively affect your SEO efforts. There are of course many more considerations which set the stage for successful search engine optimisation campaigns but fundamentally improving the source code by using a standard-based approach is one of the most important steps you can take to improve the success of your search engine rankings in the long term. It enables you to have a website which is more easily and efficiently maintained as well as render your web design on other devices such as mobile phones, handhelds, etc.